Shan Shan Lai Lei AKA Boss And Me First Impressions

I don’t write too many reviews but this show was uncharacteristically great and caught my attention from Episode 1. Alright, I was also watch for Zhang Han as well.

The premise of this story is that the main female character Shan Shan gets a call from urgent care in the middle of the night and a taxi rushes to bring her to the hospital. She has a very special blood type and finds out that the sister of the CEO of the corporation, is hemorrhaging and may lose her baby.

Shan Shan donates blood and meets the coldly handsome CEO. Manager Zheng Qi is there and explains the situations. While the CEO Feng Teng wants to just give Shan Shan a check, the sister insists on giving the girl more. So every day she asks the cooks to prepare Shan Shan a lunch box along with the one the cooks pack for her brother. She packs pig liver (which is said to help the person recover after giving blood) and all sorts of deliciousness for the girl.

Hilarity ensues as Shan Shan finds herself the recieving end of Lunch Boxes by the CEO’s secretary. She’s treated differently by all the workers who whisper whether Shan Shan, a mere and lowly assistant in the finance department was dating the high and mighty CEO.

Shan Shan’s optimistic, a little lazy, and likes to eat, but finds the attention to be too much. So she sneaks up to the highest floor’s balcony to eat alone. The problem is that’s the CEO Feng Teng’s office. She can’t see into the office but he can see out.

Every day he spends looking at how the adorably optimistic girl happily eats in front of him and does a little cheer up dance. He smiles and as days go by, as she comes up to his balcony, he copies the way she eats, and even tries her dance a little, he’s trying to understand why she is so happy. (Basically he has to stuff his face as fast as he can to keep up with her.)

He begins to do sweet things for her, such as leaving a pot of coal to heat the balcony before she comes. She happily sits by it and eats her food.

The second Lead ZHeng Qi is a play boy of epic proportions and he is best friends with Feng Teng. Shan Shan has a crush on him, as do all women in the company. He realizes that the cold Feng Teng, who rarely shows anyone emotions might have feelings for the adorable Shan Shan. He also realizes that Feng Teng who is suave with most persons, is cold and caustic towards Shan Shan when he’s with her.

Through many means, Feng Teng calls Shan Shan to come eat lunch with him. He’s like a little kid and plays all kids of tricks on her. He makes her pick out all the food he doesn’t like. At first Shan Shan thinks he’s just using her to pick out food and tries all kinds of means to get out of eating with him.

Shan Shan doesn’t understand why Feng Teng treats her coldly and asks her to come to his office to pick food out he doesn’t like but he never tells her the reason. Just secretly smiling when she’s not looking.

That’s about the first 3 or 4 episodes, but it just gets cuter and better from there.

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I think I want to recap it, because I keep smiling as re-watch the episodes. So I won’t write too much about it.

My Thoughts:

I’m not going to lie, I binge watched it, liked it, weakened and now have decided to review it. This show is adorably addictive and altogether a great watch. The interactions are creative, cute, and made me fall for the story more. I really liked the first 14 or so episodes and while the latter ones were not as good, the story does pick up after a while again

In terms of modern romance and romantic comedies, I’ve never been a big fan of Mainland Chinese fair. They drag on and on without resolution and I usually find the writing to be sub-par. The same goes most of the war dramas and about half the period dramas.

However, this was a wonderfully zippy and light fare that I’ve been looking for for ages. It was sweet without being saccharine, angsty without being too melodramatic, and did feature a few issues that Chinese youths deal with nowadays. Even if the plot is unrealistic, the writting and Zhao Li Ying/Zhan Han’s cuteness was enough to silence my protests. Zhao Li Ying is wonderfully awkward as Shan Shan, it’s a joy to watch the love story.

It didn’t have the snooty family or an incredibly dislikable second female and male leads, they were only slightly annoying. It also didn’t hurt that the drama didn’t fall into the too many pitfalls of modern Kdramas or CDrama. There were still plenty of cliches and the product placement in this show basically made the thing seem like a huge comercial at some points.

Having lived and worked in Shang Hai, I can’t say that I didn’t get excited over the backdrop. The show filmed in a lot of the old haunts I still smile over. Xin Tian Di was where my friends and I hung out a lot. There’s a jazz bar called Brown Sugar that was enormously fun and if you ever go there – go to Xin Tian Di and have a blast. They also flimed in a bunch of places in Pu Dong and even near a place where I lived. There’s a bunch of places that deserve a visit, but I digress.

I liked Zhao Li Ying’s character Shan Shan because she’s got the appetite of a large elephant and a realistically optimistic person, which is basically the traits that my best friend is known for and I can relate to. While I did find that Zhan Han’s character was slightly more wooden that I think the script called for, when he did smile, my heart melted. I also loved their interaction, it made his character so much more attractive for me when he was with her.

While I think that the Zhang Han’s character called for a coldy brilliant CEO Feng Teng who fell in love with a girl who can eat a cow, because he admired how happily she could eat, he definitely could have added more personality and made the character his own a little bit more. But, that being said, I haven’t fell for a drama in so long and I get bored by episode 3, that this one really captured my attention.